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Tag: smarts

This morning, I got up, put the dog out and began writing an article about how Rush Limbaugh called Obama supporters “walking human debris”. I wrote five or six paragraphs denouncing Limbaugh and his backward, uneducated followers and then I stopped and re-read what I had written. I decided to delete the whole thing.

I’m not going to gain anything by publicly denouncing Limbaugh. The only thing that can come from that is I lower myself to his standards and, quite frankly, I am too old to go that low anymore. We have really lost something in this country. We have allowed ourselves to be led around by the lowest common denominator and that has led us to not be able to rationally debate any subject anymore.

Oh, I’m not saying that we won’t survive. We will. We managed to pull ourselves back together after the Civil War, so I don’t think we’ll be imploding anytime soon. But, we are slowly and surely heading for a very much divided country.

We’re, also, heading for a very uneducated country. I saw a post on facebook where one person mentioned the weather in Vegas and another person stated that you have to love the south. The south? Vegas is in the Southwest. The south would be Louisiana or Georgia. I suck at geography and even I know that. I don’t write this to hurt someone’s feelings or put them down, but just to point out that we’re truly missing something.

My whole life I received two conflicting statements from my father: One was, you need to get your college education and the other was college boys don’t know anything.

Dad was right on both counts.

We need to be an educated society. We need to take economics classes so we can understand how the economy works. We need to take English classes so we can read and understand our language. We need history classes so we know from where we’ve come and, hopefully, we don’t repeat the bad stuff.

We, also, need to have some common sense. The college boys to which my father referred were those guys fresh out of college who had no common sense. Most of these gentlemen were Naval Officers with whom my father served. I totally get it, because I know a lot of college graduates who just don’t seem to understand people or the ways of the world. It seems when someone handed them a degree, their common sense left them.

I have my degree and I worked my way through school to get it. My parents paid for a grand total of four college classes. I paid for the rest. I had to keep my common sense in order to work in the real world.

Somewhere along the line, we stopped respecting those people who worked their way through school. We started calling them the elites. Now, there are exceptions to every rule – after all, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are both college dropouts – but by not making education a priority in this country, we’re setting ourselves up to fail on the International stage. Sure, you might be able to sit in your garage and invent the next “Windows”, but chances are you’re not. You need your college degree and we need people with math and science skills. That’s why we’re getting our butts handed to us by China and India.

What we don’t need in this country is a man like Rush Limbaugh spouting off about people he doesn’t even know and comparing them to savages.